I don't know how much the community knows about this - i haven't been participating much of late - but here's something amazing.
Apparently javascript is just as dynamic as python, because someone made a python-to-javascript converter in just 1200 line (pyjamas). Meanwhile google's new javascript engine (v8) blew all the others out the water, raising the bar - and now safari and firefox already have already risen to that bar with their own jit js engines. The exciting thing is that python code converted to javascript runs on v8 10 times faster (http://www.advogato.org/article/985.html). Thus google's strategy in making the JIT compiler represents what Python could (and should) be. Python should either adapt v8, Tamarin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(JavaScript_engine), or similar to make its own JIT, or take their basic principles (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZnaaUoHPhs) and recreate them for its own JIT from scratch. Until then, we can always install v8/tamarin/tracemonkey/squirrelfish and easily make a front-end that automatically uses pyjamas to convert python script to JS and runs it. Perhaps pyjamas needs some improvement to fully implement Python - the homepage isn't very clear on how exactly the JS implementation mirrors the Python implementation. Also I suppose it doesn't support Python 3.0 and would have to be changed to support that. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
